"State leaderships currently in power extensively exploit wars of the 1990s for political ends," former Croatian foreign minister, Vesna Pusic, told Belgrade daily Danas, adding that it was "a disgrace that 27 years after Operation Storm, that Croatian military operation still represents a challenge for Croatia-Serbia relations."

In an interview for Danas, published on Thursday, Pusic commented on the August 1995 military offensive in which Croatian forces overran the territory held by Serb rebels in central Croatia. While Croatia celebrates the anniversary of Operation Storm every year, Serbia sees it as a catastrophe which forced many thousands of ethnic Serbs to flee.

“I do not see anything strange in the fact that people in Croatia felt happy to see that the war was coming to an end, and that the country’s territory would be made whole again, which in no way means that one celebrates the fact that the war also ended with somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 Croatian Serbs fleeing or having been expelled from the country, nor does it mean that war crimes committed by Croatian forces are celebrated,” Croatian state agency, which distributed an abridged version of the interview to the Croatian media, cited Pusic as saying.

“As far as Croatia is concerned, Operation Storm was a military operation which de facto ended the war and liberated most of the country’s temporarily occupied areas, thus preventing the establishment of a permanent destabilizing element, a kind of Republika Srpska in its territory… Without it, Croatia would not have been able to become a stable country, it would not have been able to join the EU, NATO, the euro zone, and it generally would not have been able to function properly,” Pusic added.

“The main responsibility and cardinal sin of the then Croatian leadership is the fact that after the operation anarchy was allowed to flourish in the liberated areas, lasting three to four weeks… Most of the crimes committed against Croatian Serb civilians occurred in that period, and that is definitely a stain more on the then Croatian political leadership than the Croatian army,” Pusic said.

“Subsequent Croatian governments tried on a number of occasions to include acts of paying tribute to those victims when marking anniversaries of Operation Storm but that should have been done in a more clear, unequivocal and explicit way,” she said. “True justice will never be served in the case of people killed in the war… The best thing we can do is to make it possible for their descendants to live in a just, democratic, law-based country, without discrimination and war-mongering,” Pusic said, noting that all countries in the region “will have to make an additional effort in that regard.”

For people born after 1995, the 1990s war “should serve as a history lesson” but it must not “be used for political mobilization through hate-mongering and incitement of extremist nationalism… Politicians have for the most part been fairly harmful to citizens in our two countries,” Pusic said.

Commenting on statements about historical revisionism in Croatia, Pusic said that any denial of the criminal nature of Croatia’s World War II Ustasha regime “amounts to historical revisionism that should be exposed and identified as such.”

“But that in no way explains or justifies Serbian President, Aleksandar Vucic’s, attempt to use the victims of the Ustasha concentration camp of Jasenovac for the political mobilization of hate towards neighbors. If anything, Jasenovac should be a place or reconciliation or shared remembrance,” Hina quoted Pusic as telling Danas.